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Some companies worry that imperfect economic frameworks will lead workers to make bad decisions. They act as if the absence of these frameworks will magically protect them from bad decisions. Sadly, the lack of an economic framework does not prevent people from making economic decisions. It simply causes these decisions to be driven underground and to be based on intuition instead of analysis.

Note:common situation: approximate models are much better than no models

I used to think that sensible and compelling new ideas would be adopted quickly. Today, I believe this view is hopelessly naive. After all, it took 40 years before we recognized the power of the Toyota Production System.

Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

Coolidge was as stingy with the public fisc as he was with his verbiage—a woman once told him that she had bet her husband that she could get Coolidge to say more than three words; Coolidge quipped, “You lose.”

When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were second nature to every educated person. As we settle in to the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a vast multiverse of other cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi Universal Translator.

As the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has noted, there is nothing wrong with a news report that uses the passive voice to say, “Helicopters were flown in to put out the fires.”24 The reader does not need to be informed that a guy named Bob was flying one of the helicopters.

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.